Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to machine-to-machine communication, and in particular to machine-to-machine communication via a wireless network.
Description of the Related Art
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications in a network are characterized often by being short, regular, infrequent communications of small amounts of data, though other M2M applications do not necessarily fit this profile. An example of an application fitting this profile is automatic gas meter reporting. An example of an application not fitting this profile is a remote video surveillance camera streaming data back to a central site.
In the Meter-Reporting case, a very small amount of data is to be provided to the consumer of the data, e.g., the gas company that prepares the billing for gas usage. This data only needs to be transmitted at regular intervals of perhaps 24 hours. To use a network, for example a wireless network, to transmit this data, a registration with the network is currently required. The registration needs to be kept current or updated to allow the meter-reporting device to be accepted by the network, and to have its signaling transmitted to the data consumer. Without changes to current networks, particularly wireless networks, maintaining registration may require a high amount of overhead compared to the actual quantity of data transferred.
There is also the problem of signaling and addressing. If each meter-reporting unit has its own identity that is used by the network to address it, and if that address is part of the existing address space of other units using that network, e.g., mobile phones, then all of those addresses/identities can be quickly consumed as the number of M2M devices proliferates.